Printing Natural Knowledge

Home , Accademia del Cimento, Antonio Nardi, Domenico Guglielmini, Geminiano Montanari, Michelangelo Ricci, Nicolas Steno

Chapter 3: Printing Natural Knowledge

“The purpose of writing may be to persuade the wise and intelligent; or else it may be to persuade everyone in town.” So wrote Giovanni Alfonso Borelli, professor at the university of Pisa and already the author of an important work on Euclid, to his ex-colleague Marcello Malpighi, just starting out on the faculty at the university of Bologna and about to publish his fundamental work revealing the microstructure of the lungs. Deciding what to publish, and for whom, was no easy matter, still some thirty years after the twin trials of Orazio Morandi and Galileo Galilei. “But if you choose to write to the common citizens of Bo- logna to persuade them about the calumnies made against truth,” Borelli continued, “I conceive that in this case you may use every effort to deride any person who peddles a pile of idiocies just to offend virtuous and meritorious people.” 1 Of course, for Borelli, “virtuous and meritorious people” meant persons who followed empirical method for the study of nature, exemplified by Galileo; and “truth” meant the truth drawn from the use of that method. “Idio- cies” meant ideas conceived by those whom the Galileians conceived as dogmatists and mystifiers. Still in the 1660s, whether Galileo’s disciples and their followers would triumph against the dogmatists and mystifiers was by no means clear. The story of their campaign to capture public attention, with all its fits and starts, is far less well known than the content of their ideas. It will occupy us here. The decision to take the campaign for the new science to “the common citizens of Bologna,” or Venice, or Florence, or Rome, was not taken lightly. “Learn at Galileo’s expense,” Michelangelo Ricci told Donato Rossetti, Borel- li’s student and then a professor at Pisa, “He ran into so much trouble just because he picked fights.” 2 He would not go so far to suggest, with the literary gadfly Gregorio Leti, that “whoever wishes to look minutely into the effects that an author’s ideas might have on the minds of people would never write a book.” 3 But as Roman correspondent to the discreet Accademia del Cimento in Florence, he well knew how to avoid controversy. And the best way was to ig- nore the revolution in print and work behind the scenes. Enthusiasm about publishing became unconditional only around the 1690s. By that time, a host of new genres and methods had emerged, from natural science handbills to periodical publications. As the Italian practitioners of the natural sciences began to understand their market, they experimented with new

41 42 Chapter 3 techniques for appealing to it. To be sure, the boundary between those interested in investigating natural phenomena and those who lived off the investigations of others was not particularly distinct. Nor was there a distinct division between those interested in continuing the innovative tradition of Galileo and those interested in following a more traditional line of research. But enough can be said about the emergence of scientific entrepreneurialism in seventeenth- century publishing in this chapter to serve as a background for our discussion of the education market in the next chapter. Diffidence about publishing natural knowledge had many causes, and the confusing behavior of the authorities in charge of monitoring the printing press was certainly a major one. Church officials ignored open expressions by influ- ential French clerics like Marin Mersenne and Pierre Gassendi in favor of the same heliocentric views condemned in the trial of Galileo. Yet they seemed to be just as adamant as in Galileo’s time in opposing the publication of new ideas about science as late as 1663, when they put Descartes’ works on the Index. Then, within four years of the condemnation of Descartes, they permitted open expressions of various versions of the mechanical philosophy plainly in their midst, in the Roman Giornale de’ letterati , run by Francesco Nazari and collaborators from 1668 (“what would be wrong . . . if the generation and corruption of things should be caused only by local movements of the atoms and there would be no substantial forms in the world”? 4) Elsewhere in Italy the situation was not much clearer. In Bologna, the local censor provided Malpighi with a perfect pretext for seeking the advantages of an English publisher by objecting to the Protestant addressee of the letter on silkworms (Henry Oldenburg, later changed to the Royal Society) even though he had approved of similar dedica- tions on previous occasions. In Naples, the local Inquisition said nothing about Lucantonio Porzio’s openly Cartesian explanation of matter and motion in Del sorgimento de’ licori (1670) concerning capillary action, in spite of the cries of the Aristotelians, who had enough clout to induce a Cartesian witch hunt later on. 5 Furthermore, anything printed was not only subject to being read, but also to being stolen. Borelli worried about putting the Accademia del Cimento into direct contact with its sister-academy, the French Académie des Sciences. “It seems to me that we ought to be informed about the activities and speculations of that academy,” he noted, “[but] I am hesitant . . . [since] I cannot be sure that those French gentlemen . . . [will not] follow the old custom of making foreigners the authors [of our discoveries].” 6 Printers all over Europe well knew that intellectual property, however fiercely defended by writers, was not yet a legal category. Others believed the potential audience for natural knowledge in Italy was too small. To secure credit for his discoveries, Malpighi was content to keep his friend and patron Cardinal Scipione Borghese up to date on all his activities at the University of Bologna; but instead of publishing his letter on silkworms in Italy, he published it in London, and in the one language all the experts understood: Latin. His correspondents agreed. “[Your book] will have far greater success,” noted his lifelong friend, the Calabrian physician Giambattista Capuc-

Printing Natural Knowledge 43 ci, “than it would have had in Venice or Bologna . . . and it will have a wider and longer itinerary than in our cities.” 7 Indeed, in Italy as elsewhere, non-print forms of communication continued to be the fundamental vehicle of scientific ideas. Letters possessed the ad- vantage of immunity to the authorities that monitored the press, and they were never seized in customs raids along with books and journals. They usually took two to four weeks to cross Europe, as against the several months to a year required for news to appear in the journals. 8 Even though journals could promise wider diffusion, correspondence habits established in the late Renaissance, by which busy virtuosi received and answered as many as a dozen letters a day, guaranteed that information got out when they wanted it to. And those virtuosi who did not want to bother to spread their ideas themselves could expect pro- fessional letter-writers, successors to Marin Mersenne and Nicolas Claude Fabri de Peiresc, like the Royal Society secretary, Oldenburg, and the grand ducal librarian in Florence, Antonio Magliabechi, to do it for them. Magliabechi accordingly justified his services to Malpighi by pointing out how “the time you have for writing your very learned works is so precious.” His correspondence, amounting to over 20,000 entries, became the most voluminous of them all. 9 Manuscripts continued to be a legitimate form of publication in Italy and abroad. Borelli’s accounts of the Accademia del Cimento’s solution to the Sat- urn ring controversy, passed around among members of the academy and its correspondents in Rome and The Hague, was considered a sufficient solution to the quarrel raging between Christiaan Huygens and Honoré Fabri. 10 Indeed, manuscripts still had considerable advantages over printed publications. Malpi- ghi could continue to put changes on his extended letter on conglobate glands while handing the manuscript around to friends. As soon as he tried to print it his troubles began. With so many manuscripts of the letter in circulation, his printer managed to get hold of the penultimate—instead of the final—version; so Malpighi was forced to have his latest corrections penned into all the printed copies by hand. 11 Finally, personal encounter as a means of exchanging information continued to be just as important an alternative to print in the late seventeenth century as it had been when Galileo packed his telescope and went to Rome to demonstrate the satellites of Jupiter. Into Italy came the English physician John Ray, the Danish naturalist Nicolas Steno, and the French astronomer Adrien Auzout. Out went Lorenzo Magalotti, ex-secretary of the Accademia del Cimento (to Eng- land) and Bolognese university astronomer Giovanni Domenico Cassini (to become royal astronomer in France). To make sure sophisticated travelers missed nothing, special guidebooks began to appear, such as Gregorio Leti’s Italia regnante and Jean Huguetan’s Voyage en Italie . “The collection of Count Mascardi [in Verona],” said a typical passage in the latter, “is full of natural rarities, antiquities, and good paintings.” And he provided a list of all the “learned authors and curious and ingenious artisans of Italy” who could be called upon for consultation. 12 At least until the 1670s, Italian natural science investigators mostly put the finishing touches on the communications mechanisms they had inherited from their sixteenth-century predecessors, without trying to modify them too much.

44 Chapter 3 What Galileo had so innovatively put together, namely, the two main publics of experts and amateurs, they solemnly put asunder. Let us examine some of their productions. In disputes with their colleagues, the practitioners perfected the standard academic point-by-point refutation. It was not very effective unless readers knew something about the works opposed. Since specialized treatises had very small press runs, a disputant usually fit long segments of the disputed work into his own treatise, as did Galileo’s disciple Carlo Dati, the erudite librarian of Cardi- nal Giulio de’ Medici, in refuting an attack on his fellow-Galilean Evangelista Torricelli. Unfortunately, such refutations only appealed to readers directly interested in the subject at hand and left everyone else completely cold. “Indiffer- ent readers often seem disgusted,” explained Borelli to Malpighi, “by those se- mantic quarrels and barbs, since they do not feel the same passion [as the disputants].” 13 A few practitioners accordingly combined the academic refutation with the dialogue. This allowed them at least some of the advantages of a form that was still widely regarded as “looser and freer” than other forms, without the difficulties, which they all recognized, of writing a pure dialogue. 14 An example was the refutation by Stefano Degli Angeli, an assistant to the re- nowned mathematician Bonaventura Cavalieri at Bologna and later professor at Padua, of the geocentric arguments of the Galileans’ archenemy, the Ferrarese Jesuit virtuoso Giovanni Battista Riccioli.15 Unlike Galileo, he made no conces- sions to readers who might have difficulty following his explanations. Never- theless, a dialogue seemed less dull than the usual approach, even where the amusing figure of Simplicio, invented by Galileo to personify dogmatism, was replaced by pedantic citations in the original Latin from Riccioli’s treatise. The one figure that seemed to carry forth Galileo’s campaign for popular science was Alessandro Marchetti. The mid-century quarrel concerned atomism, and Marchetti, a mathematician at Pisa, believed the public ought finally to be brought up to date. “[The doctrine] does not deserve to be hidden indoors,” he wrote to Leopoldo de’ Medici, “but on the contrary, it ought to be propagat- ed and taught to all men.” 16 And by providing the first Italian paraphrase of Lucretius’ De natura rerum he hoped to do just that. To make sure none of his readers would mistake his paraphrase for a mere poetical diversion or its unusu- al doctrines for mere fantasies designed to amaze the reader, he changed the geographical and chronological setting of the poem from ancient Greece to modern Europe. In the passages on Sicily, the country of Empedocles, he inserted a eulogy of Giovanni Alfonso Borelli; and in those on the birth and death of the world, he inserted one on Pierre Gassendi. Furthermore, to make sure readers would not pass it off as just another translation, he inserted an elaborate disclaimer of the famous doctrines on the mortality of the soul in Book Three, like the anti-heliocentric letter prefaced by Andreas Osiander to Copernicus’ On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres . “So much do I detest [these views],” he protested, “that I shall be ready to defend their opposite, whenever necessity calls, not only by employing all my intellect and strength but also by spilling all of my blood.” 17 Few readers could have resisted the temptation to read on. But poetry was a dangerous medium, as Marchetti soon found out. It seemed to savor too much of Galileo’s animated campaigns for awakening interest in

Printing Natural Knowledge 45 science in “the whole city” that might corrupt the minds of the excessively ex- citable Florentines. 18 Officials in Florence, like their counterparts all over Italy, agreed that transmitting the latest ideas in accessible form was worse than transmitting them in complex and uninviting treatises. 19 So the latter were to be permitted, and the former were not. Still, no one could be sure. Leopoldo de’ Medici accordingly prohibited the printing of Marchetti’s work in Florence while praising it as a monument to Tuscan scholarship. “He wanted an auto- graph copy for himself,” Marchetti recalled, “and another for the grand duke.” 20 Marchetti meanwhile was assured of full credit, as the work was referred to in book lists sent to France as though it were a published book. Most of the Italian practitioners preferred to hold back on printing for non- expert audiences and divulge their ideas orally to a single, well-defined and relatively small fragment of the general audience—namely, students in the university medical faculties where most of them taught. 21 Preparing scores of faith- ful students who could later lend authoritative support to one or another side of a scientific dispute seemed like a more secure method than either trying to win popular applause or trying to convert obstinate professors, which had been Gali- leo’s two chief tactics. “According to the order of nature,” Borelli remarked, such students “will have to remain in the world after the old intractable ones are dead.” 22 This was, he added, “a path that leads pleasantly to our goal without damaging our allies.” Lorenzo Bellini, professor at Pisa and one of the best- known anatomists of his time, agreed. “It is amusing to see the university every year more filled with my protégés,” he remarked, “and now the principal chairs of practical and theoretical medicine are occupied with much applause by my students, among whom are numbered also the [professor of] simples, and various logicians and philosophers.” 23 Best of all, practitioners could thus avoid any of the difficulties posed by publishing their ideas in printed form—including the difficulty of having to prove all the offhand statements they made during the course of extemporaneous in-class delivery. The only disadvantage to this approach, as we shall see in the next chapter, was that the university medical faculties were still not chiefly conceived as places for the inculcation of the latest scientific ideas. Italian practitioners between the age of Galileo and the 1670s never tried to put all of their less practical ideas together into easily readable prose, lively and with plenty of rhetorical pyrotechnics, a kind of experimental philosophy pour les dames calculated to please at least the more adventurous among the general readers. 24 Yet, to capture the attention of busy amateurs more accustomed to baroque novels and works of history than to the abstruse problems of science, practitioners could not stop at proving that the sun was the center of the universe. They also had to say something about how the universe originated, why rain fell, what meteors were made of, what was a rainbow, and what man’s po- sition was in relation to God—just the sorts of things that could provide good material for conversation, and that Descartes furnished to French readers with enormous success in his Dioptrique and Météores .25 The one Italian practitioner who came closest to serving such a public was Francesco Eschinardi, mathematics professor at Perugia and later a member of the scientific academy of Giovanni Giusto Ciampini in Rome. He published a

46 Chapter 3 manual that avoided the difficulties of synthesis while ostensibly offering what anyone might want to know about the latest developments. “The only aim of this work is to satisfy those who desire to know about important and interesting physicomathematical questions,” he claimed, “without having to worry about difficult propositions and long tedious disputations.” 26 He assured the reader that he would include only such issues as his readers were likely to find interesting. And accordingly, he briefly explained how sunspots proved the sun’s rotation and the satellites of Jupiter proved a fluid, sphereless sky; and he gave the barest outlines of a quantitative physics by way of Galileo’s explanations of falling and floating bodies. But after he had omitted all the most complicated discoveries and the most difficult points, he could think of nothing for the second half of his book except to demonstrate a few of the technological achieve- ments that were the byproduct of recent scientific research in the most superfi- cial way possible—various types of clocks, fountains, and hydraulic organs, with a few instructions on how to build them. So cool was the reception to the work that he gave up proceeding to the subsequent volumes of what was sup- posed to be a multivolume series. Italian practitioners also missed the opportunity to compose basic textbooks for their less adventurous but far more numerous general readers in public schools all over Italy. The Italianate Frenchman Claude Bérigard, professor at the universities first of Pisa and then of Padua, came closest, when he aimed his Circulus pisanus at those who “know little philosophy” and “less Latin”; but as it turned out, the work required a good measure of both. He explained such novelties as the circulation of the blood, Galileo’s law of falling bodies, and the corpuscular analysis of matter, and he tried to lighten up the discussion by putting it in the form of a realistic dialogue between Charilaeus the Aristotelian and Aristaeus the modern. Yet instead of organizing his argument by subjects in order to guide the attention of his readers, he followed the organization of his university lectures according to the various books of Aristotle’s Physics . In addition, he followed the typical post-Renaissance lecture practice of omitting long citations from the parts of Aristotle’s original text to which he continually referred. At the university, he would have been correct in assuming that students already had one of the innumerable printed versions in circulation, without which his comments made little sense. Not so among the general public. Readers who did not possess a copy of the Physics or a rudimentary knowledge of it, were unlikely to appreciate his attempt to put together an alternative philosophical system to Aristotle’s from the various others available in antiquity. To these readers, the work probably seemed like nothing but a disjointed collection of cantankerous cavils. He himself admitted to having “[chosen] the opinions that were the most coherent in order to put a doctrine together” for no other purpose than so it could “stand up to assaults of Aristotle and dare to attack the citadel of the peripatetics.” 27 As a result of his uncompromising choices, his Circulus pisanus eventually took its place not beside Descartes’ Dioptrique and Météores but beside Pierre Gassendi’s complicated avant-garde and equally uncompromising Syntagma , among the works that other practitioners like Bo- relli adopted as textbooks for a university student elite. 28

Printing Natural Knowledge 47 While the Italian practitioners of natural science investigations renounced the job of finding agreeable vehicles for their ideas, readers in search of popular science were forced to rely on the widely circulating works of writers at the intellectual fringes. Almanacs and popular astrological works provided attractive confirmations of popular ideas as well as useful advice on everything from the proper time for planting to the proper time for conceiving children. Giovan- ni Serpetro’s Marketplace of Marvels offered a fascinating compendium of everything the reader could want to know— from “the virtues of plants and met- als,” “the nature of animals,” and “the anatomy of Man,” to the ways, ostensibly as mysterious as their descriptions, of “prolong[ing] life, chang[ing] the com- plexion of man, loosen[ing] from certain people the force of the imagination, mitigat[ing] the torments and accelerat[ing] the time of clarification.” All this it promised to do through “a few general precepts.” After all, it noted, “the current century . . . has little inclination . . . toward the arduous and much toward the amusing.” 29 However, lack of contact with the scientific debates of his time meant that Serpetro had to rely on such outdated sixteenth-century sources as Ulisse Aldrovandi and Konrad Gesner for whatever he could not find in Pliny, and, for his marvelous cures, on uncritical popular collections like Timoteo Rossello’s De’ secreti universali (Venice: 1559). The job of diffusing, to the slightly more sophisticated audience of students in the public schools, something closer to what the natural science practitioners were doing, devolved on the rank and file of religious orders. These writers were not mainly interested in winning a place in literature—not even among such scientific greats as the Jesuit virtuosi Giovanni Battista Riccioli and Giuseppe Ferroni.30 Much less were they interested in converting readers over to their particular scientific views. It was better to teach methodically-ordered traditional positions even if erroneous or questionable, they agreed, rather than still unauthorized theories, even if true. Their modern counterparts have agreed. 31 Particularly successful at selling traditional science in an attractive package was Giovanni Battista Giattini, teacher at the Jesuit Collegio Romano. He designed his Physica for use in the general philosophy course where science was usually situated. The Renaissance textbook format furnished him with a basic model, but he fit together all of Aristotle’s main points on given subjects under separate subheadings so readers would never have to turn to the Aristotelian text at all. To make consultation even easier, he offered a handy index indicat- ing the main things to remember concerning each subject—for example, that “matter” is “not a simple body,” is “a cause and not just a condition with re- spect to form” and “has an innate tendency toward form.” Meanwhile, he did his best to introduce the fashionable and apparently useful modern empirical scientific approach without adopting the modern conclusions. He described the Torricelli barometric experiment, trying to explain the rising mercury without reference to the void, inadmissible in Aristotelian physics. 32 In his section on cosmology, he showed how to use commonplace analogies, Galileo-style, to clarify complicated problems. 33 Still, science and its methods were not Giatti- ni’s main interest; much more important was philosophical correctness. His analysis of recent astronomical discoveries was exemplary. No one could deny

48 Chapter 3 that Galileo’s responses to the objections against Copernicanism were good ones, he claimed. However, “we must interpret the Scripture literally as much as possible,” he insisted; so “I tell you that such a system in any case does not exist.” 34 Fortunately, Tycho Brahe’s system with the earth at the center and all the planets circling around a revolving sun seemed to fit the appearances almost as well as Copernicus, and the textbook or classroom were not the places to quarrel about the precise interpretation of the best observations. After all, God could decide on whatever system he wanted, and it was impossible to ask his motives for having chosen a geocentric one. Wherever possible, Giattini used science as an encouragement for virtuous civic action. To this the discussion of comets lent itself best. Everyone knew that all motions of planets occurred within the eight perfect spheres of the heavens and the tiny spheres embedded in these spheres within which the planets moved backward in order produce the apparent effect of retrograde motion. But in order to account for the eccentric motion of the comets, the perfect spheres of the heavens would have to be mul- tiplied ad infinitum. Just as a prince, then, occasionally must enact unprece- dented laws for the common good, so God, the prince of the heavens, ordains extraordinary things in the sky; and this should keep us mindful that he is our Lord, just as the action of the prince should keep us mindful that we owe him political obedience. 35 No one could deny that the religious textbook writers succeeded in providing a form of science that could be imparted effectively to the general public. Donato Rossetti observed that the students formed by way of the textbooks, at least in Turin, were the only intellectuals around. “There is no one here who knows how to talk about anything except war, hunting, and building,” he wrote, “apart from the Jesuits, who with their usual techniques keep an incredible number of logicians, physicians and metaphysicians.” 36 Even Malpighi had to admit that the textbooks had “made letters popular everywhere,” although he stiffly added, “they have degraded them.” 37 When periodical journalism first emerged in Italy with the publication of the Roman Giornale de’ letterati in 1668, the Italian practitioners did not immedi- ately see its potential for putting the job of scientific popularization back into their own hands. They did not even see its promise for putting scientific communication in Italy on a more organized footing. Cultural isolation did not seem to be a problem except in a few outposts like Sicily, home of the Sicilian natural philosopher Paolo Boccone, or Turin, home of Rossetti. 38 The decentralized printing industry, located in no less than 160 Italian cities, seemed to be suffi- ciently covered by the existing epistolary networks. 39 Works published in out- of-the way places could be procured by letters to friends, as Lorenzo Bellini discovered when he had to find a copy of a nearly untraceable book published by Montanari in Bologna. 40 The journalists were not much help. The Roman Giornale included mostly translations of articles cribbed from two other recently established journals, the Journal des sçavans and the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. However, the rules of the genre were still in flux.41 Lack of knowledge about the possible public for journalism called for keeping costs to a minimum, so individual issues of the first journals were rarely more than four to eight pages

Printing Natural Knowledge 49 long. This permitted little space for printing letters or anything else from contributors in full. Hence, most articles consisted of second-hand reports on experiments or on observations done by others. The few original articles were included with a kind of apology. “In order to make the invention [in the book under review] easier for artisans to carry out,” the Giornale de’ letterati explained, “I have thought it a good idea to present [a sample]” 42 In another case, “It was thought well to insert these [mathematical] problems exactly as they arrived from France.” 43 The one full-length article in the entire Giornale was a six-page description of a bullhorn invented in London by Samuel Moreland.44 Practitioners’ attitudes soon began to change. As more and more periodical publications containing articles concerning natural knowledge began arriving in Italy from abroad, rapid publicizing of results began to be established as the ideal. Lorenzo Bellini found publication to be the best hedge against contests of priority in discovery. “Publish vigorously!” he told Malpighi. And again, “How long [does your work] have to stay buried? . . . If you do not let me print it, I will do so anyway in spite of you.” With so much pressure to print, few virtuosi dared to leave unpublished observations “to the vicissitudes of fortune.” 45 Mal- pighi quickly became a convinced proselytizer for this view. Publication, he said, would “guarantee” Bolognese virtuoso Luigi Ferdinando Marsili’s priority for “the invention” of a work he had in progress on the history of engineering. 46 Giorgio Baglivi in Rome called for insertion of an honorable mention of himself in connection with a work he had published six years before, and his only apparent reason was that he had not yet appeared in the journal in question. 47 By that time, virtually every practitioner of note in Italy had been recognized in this way. Some practitioners who still followed the traditional practice of occasional publication now felt constrained to apologize. “I deposited a message [about my new surveying device] along with other studies of mine with the Most Illustri- ous Bolognese Senate [sixteen years ago],” explained Geminiano Montanari in the preface to one book, “but I did not publish them until six years ago because I was waiting to put them into a more voluminous work.” 48 On another occasion, his student explained that the master had good reason for being so slow to publish. “[Even though] he passed around a few copies to some friends, he held back to make sure that he was on the right track.” 49 Others invented new forms of publication to transmit new categories of information particular to seventeenth-century natural knowledge. One new form was the brief “Observations” favored by Francesco Redi. Yet another was the scientific broadsheet, pioneered by the astronomer Giovanni Domenico Cassini. In a single year, 1666, he published three. Pressed by time and money, he omitted all the rhetorical amenities of the standard printed letter and included nothing but a detailed description of his telescopic discoveries using Eustachio Divini’s new 45-palm telescope and, in two cases, diagrams of what he saw, folded over in quarto and printed on both sides with a title at the top, Martis circa axem proprium revolubilis observationes Bononiae . And no sooner had he published the first of them than another observer, one Salvatore Serra, tried to claim the discoveries for himself; but his far longer and more pedantic pamphlet, with none of Cassini’s attractive diagrams, was doomed to provoke noth-

50 Chapter 3 ing but a few yawns. 50 Redi published his Osservazioni and Esperienze together in a single twenty-three-page pamphlet in the same year in which he made them (1673), along with a letter about himself written by an English correspondent of Henry Oldenburg. He then republished them a few years later along with a pre- viously independent four-page letter on salt in a new collection called Opuscoli vari . By the end of the century, a new library of publication types concerned with natural knowledge had practically replaced the sixteenth-century genres. Paolo Boccone published two “Museums” containing various “observations” on everything from newly discovered plant species to the Sicilian earthquake of 1693. The idea was similar to the collection of scientific correspondence, such as that of Leonardo Fioravanti in the sixteenth century and Stanislas Lubienicki in the seventeenth. The difference was that each four- to fifteen-page “Observation,” while still addressed to someone, contained none of the amenities of the letter as stipulated by the ars dictaminis tradition; instead it began with a preface ex- plaining the truth-value of the evidence presented. “In regard to this tragic earthquake,” began one, “I am obliged to rely on the testimonies of the people who were there at the time,” he explained; “Your Excellency must therefore . . . bear with me in certain inconsistencies . . . since the same persons were worried and stupefied by terror.” In other “Observations,” all form disappeared and simple lists of phenomena were allowed to speak for themselves. “Augusta, demesnial city, had a population of 6173,” began another entry, “destroyed entirely. . . . The dead: 2300.” 51 As rapid publication became the norm, the many new forms of communication created by natural science investigators filled in whatever gaps remained between brief letters and observations, on the one hand, and, on the other, sus- tained academic treatises like Borelli’s De motu animalium . Somewhere in the middle were the new forms designed to present prolonged series of experiments on related problems. Lorenzo Magalotti and his collaborators at the Accademia del Cimento produced the collection of experiments called Saggi or “attempts,” containing bare summaries of observations with descriptions of the instruments used, without any attempt to situate them into a larger context. The experiments on the barometer said nothing about whether the space above the mercury was a vacuum or extremely rare aether. This form was perfect for academies like the Cimento, devoted to natural knowledge, where the diversity of opinions—in this case, concerning whether the void existed or not and whether atomism was an acceptable description of matter—was so great that the experiments would have taken forever to appear if their editor had waited around for members to agree on what they meant. 52 More appropriate for a single researcher, on the other hand, was the collection of experiments followed by their explanations and called Pensieri or “thoughts.” This apparently introspective form left Mon- tanari free to explain experiments similar to those of the Cimento on the basis of air pressure, the void, and the corpuscular theory. 53 When the Venetian printer Girolamo Albrizzi opened the doors of his Gal- leria di Minerva journal in 1696 to original articles untouched by any editorial intervention, he was deluged with more material than he could handle. 54 Natu- rally, contributors felt free to treat journal articles like any other form, to be

Printing Natural Knowledge 51 combined and exchanged whenever the occasion permitted. Giovanni Domeni- co Cassini and Geminiano Montanari republished their journal communications independently after the first appearance. Cassini also operated the other way around, republishing his observations on Mars later in the Galleria di Miner- va .55 As the communication revolution got under way, journal publications served many uses—not all of them corresponding to the familiar modern ones. 56 For one thing, they served to show the members of the Galilean school that Italian science was no longer their private affair in a one-sided battle against their Aris- totelian and vitalist adversaries. Donato Rossetti combined Galileism with vital- ism, and Borelli combined it with atomism, in spite of Galileo’s reluctance to accept either of these views. 57 No longer was it possible to presume absolute consensus on, for instance, “the silliness in the philosophy of” the followers of the sixteenth-century vitalist chemist Theophrastus Paracelsus.” 58 For Lionardo Di Capua, Elia Astorini, and Sebastiano Bartoli, all reputedly up-to-date natural science investigators of the Neapolitan school, extolled its benefits. 59 Cartesian- ism was no longer ridiculed; and Giuseppe Valletta, another Neapolitan, insisted on using it as a working hypothesis for his own work. To transform the in- creasing differences between the Italian practitioners into veritable separate schools, many of them prepared sturdy groups of disciples in the major cities and universities all over the peninsula. 60 All these transformations began to be more apparent as reviews of Italian books began to occupy a larger and larger proportion of the new journals’ contents. Benedetto Bacchini, antiquary and author of the Giornale de’ letterati in Parma from 1686 eventually gave up reviewing non-Italian books entirely. To be sure, his accurate year-by-year representation of the Italian publishing scene was more useful than what he actually had to say about the books. He believed that Galileism, Cartesianism, Paracelsianism, and everything else were unim- portant as long as the practitioners tried to show the connections between their own fields and every other field in the encyclopedia of human knowledge. He tried to provide an example by making the connections between the disciplines of the books he reviewed and whatever other ones seemed closest, and he praised works for the breadth of their synthesis of information of the most dis- parate kinds. Like the Roman journalists, he hoped his readers would adopt his ideal, the only one for a real “man of letters.” In the end, however, he not only failed to establish the connections he sought, but he demonstrated the irrecon- cilable divergences between various theories concerning basic matters of natural history and erudition and the inability of a single person to come to grips with all of them. And when he admitted that the enterprise “cannot be carried out well,” he simply added to the discredit that the most extravagant late seventeenth-century encyclopedists had already brought upon themselves. 61 Left to find their own way through a scientific maze made more and more complex as the journals continued to keep better track of it, still in doubt about exactly how science ought to be defined, and lacking the rudiments of a profes- sional organization of science, the Italian practitioners eventually reached a tacit agreement about what science ought not to be. One element that at least some of them agreed to reject was just what Bacchini had advocated: encyclo-

52 Chapter 3 pedism. Michelangelo Fardella, professor at the University of Padua and a col- laborator on the Venetian Galleria di Minerva , was among the most outspoken critics. “Since the mind cannot process and digest such a multitude of diverse and disjointed information,” he warned, “it inevitably vomits it up and rejects the major part of it instead of growing and becoming stronger. This is why,” he added, “among the men of letters the most disgusting and least knowledgeable are these encyclopedists.” 62 His call for more concentrated attention to specialized subjects, in an article which he prominently published in an early number of the Galleria the same year as Bacchini’s last, was sure to have a powerful effect. Even more of the Italian practitioners, overwhelmed by the outpourings of their fellows all over the peninsula, agreed on another element in the definition of science: that it should concentrate on empirical observation and leave sys- tematic explanation to the metaphysicians. A comment of Bacchini’s concerning specialized scientific works seemed to hit the mark. Observation was the only aspect of science that had been constantly improving over the centuries, he contended. “The best result of so many physical and medical meditations has to do strictly with [the] rational experience [of Man], which has . . . always been constantly true.” Attempts at explanation based on true observations, he believed, so far had not produced particularly brilliant results. “Of modern works, the only ones that reach perfection are those that pertain to anatomical inspec- tion and the little that has been gleaned from practical observation.” 63 The practitioners did not accept Bacchini’s condemnation of all but anatomical observation, but they agreed in establishing strict empiricism as a standard for judging each other and their transalpine counterparts. While Lionardo Di Capua used this criterion to judge all the physiologists of his time, including his favorite, Paracelsus, Vallisneri used it as a basis for his criticism of all biologists from Pliny onward and for his proposal of Malpighi as a methodological model. And the same criterion used against Giacinto Cestoni by Giambattista Trionfetti was also used by Giambattista Capucci against the Royal Society’s plan for a natural history of the whole world: namely, that observations must be carefully sifted, controlled, and, most of all, repeated. And indeed, it was just this methodological issue that came to the forefront of Italian debates on embryology in the last years of the century, those debates in which Italian contributions finally placed Italy back at the center of European science. 64 Toward the end of the century a few natural science investigators in Naples sought a new context for scientific observations upon which all practitioners could agree; and they called it the “Italian philosophy.” A background for such an indigenous philosophy could be found in Democritus, they believed; and remnants of it could be traced through all the greats from Galileo to Borelli. First suggested by Giuseppe Valletta, Francesco d’Andrea, and Tommaso Cor- nelio, founding members of the Accademia degli Investiganti, the idea was taken up again, in a different context, by Giambattista Vico.65 But by that time natural science investigators had already adopted a new program and broadcast it in the Giornale de’ letterati d’Italia .66 As the novelty of journals began to wear off, practitioners began exploring the various other new uses to which communications to them might be put. One

Printing Natural Knowledge 53 new use was to establish international scientific relations. Publication in the journals of articles by foreigners was a far more evident and effective demon- stration of international collaboration than was the exchange of personal letters. This was as true in transalpine Europe as it was in Italy. Information in the Philosophical Transactions about Malpighi’s work showed the success of the Royal Society’s plan of contacting experts all over the world. Information in the Journal des sçavans about Giovanni Domenico Cassini’s work showed the ef- fectiveness of Louis XIV’s policies in bringing together a cosmopolitan group in the Académie des Sciences. Information in the Roman Giornale about the work of Adrien Azout showed that these connections were reciprocated by the Académie’s new sister society, Giovanni Giusto Ciampini’s Accademia Fisico Matematica in Rome. Another new use of journal communications was to create foreign audiences for otherwise obscure local publications. One example of success in this was Johann Jacob Heinrich of Strasburg, who managed to find out about Italian publications that caused even his Italian correspondents themselves to scratch their heads in despair at ever being able to find them. Similar- ly, William Waller used knowledge from journals to contradict Malpighi’s af- firmation that “the study of letters is silent among us [in Italy]” by responding with a list of Italians whose works he wanted to know about. 67 Another new use of journal communications was to provide a forum for collaboration on projects in which virtuosi in various parts of Italy were involved. It was through the Roman Giornale , for instance, that various observers all over the peninsula were able to compare notes on the lunar eclipse of 1674. 68 Yet another use, at least according to astronomer John Flamsteed, was to protect discoveries. 69 No longer did convergence on particular problems and the absence of copyright conventions have to present the threat of nasty priority disputes of the sort that had plagued Galileo and Torricelli. Christiaan Huygens accordingly published his rules of impact and quantity of motion in the Journal des sçavans as well as in the Giornale of Rome to ensure proper credit to himself. “Since there are similar rules in the last volume of the English journal,” he had the Roman journalists explain, “the author declares that he gave his to the Royal Company [sic! for Royal Society] before those were printed in order not to be accused of having stolen from others.” 70 Meanwhile, practitioners discovered the most important use of all for publications: as a new technique for social advancement. Whether at court or among patrician intellectuals or in academies or in educational institutions, ecclesiasti- cal and lay, traditional means of advancement involved winning the esteem of the great through networking, exchanging favors, and engaging in ceremonious practices like public disputations, dinners, and soirées. Publishing, the virtuosi seemed to believe, might allow them to short-circuit the system by appealing beyond these milieus to the wider constituency of public opinion. The new genres of publication were aimed not just at the inbred audience of the virtuosi themselves, nor at the increasingly large crowds of medical students who thronged the halls of the recently refurbished and in some cases recently established universities. They were aimed at reaching a broad range of artisans, mer- chants, and amateurs of all ranks—“everybody in town,” as Borelli said to Mal- pighi. Said Albrizzi, introducing the Galleria di Minerva , “there must be

54 Chapter 3 delight even for the unlearned, as well as for every sort of learned.” And another journalist addressed his work to “those who are rather uncultivated and would like to get rid of their rusticity.” 71 A widely perceived rebirth of public interest in knowledge encouraged practitioners to address their ideas to a broader audience. There was scarcely a successful tradesman or merchant who did not show off his collection, however small, of carefully preserved books. 72 Whether they understood them or not, all categories of readers, from nobles to clergymen to lawyers, began buying books on “erudite” or “scientific” subjects. A Venetian merchant named Giovanni Tibelli made the collection of scientific texts a veritable hobby. 73 Another named Gasparo Chechel specialized in astronomy. 74 A painter named Pietro Liberi presented a veritable library of tracts by German chemical philosophers. 75 A lawyer named Pietro Paolo Alberigo possessed rare mathematical works. 76 Even the pastor of the parish of San Giovanni Grisostomo, Giovanni Maria Spadon, possessed not only the works of scientific classics, but also recent textbooks. 77 While science was becoming a method of advancement for university professors, interest in it was becoming a status symbol among the general public. Not surprisingly, when Albrizzi opened the doors of his Galleria di Minerva to whoever would contribute, the number of dilettante readers who sought the prestige of a place in the press was more than anyone could have imagined. Be- fore long, contributors began to act as though progress in science was everyone’s affair. One Giovanni Taddei claimed to have demonstrated that Boyle’s notion of the elasticity and pressure of the air and not the Aristotelian horror of the vacuum made flesh rise in a cupping glass. And even if contributors’ claims were sometimes difficult to accept—such as when a certain Sigismondo Val- iano in Siena claimed to have disproved spontaneous generation in three pages—they nonetheless testified to the growing interest in the increase of cultural accomplishments. 78 In response to an increased demand, practitioners set out to take control of the public view of themselves. For one thing, they sought to replace the popular view of naturalist as a sort of magician with the new one of the naturalist as a source of answers to popular questions about commonplace occurrences. They got a head start from the necessity to explore fields that came directly into contact with the daily experience of their fellow-citizens that had recently emerged in the continuing search for new sources of empirical evidence to support one or another of the various competing scientific syntheses. Their titles in these fields were enough to catch the attention of curious browsers: Observations concerning those glass drops and threads that completely shatter when broken in any part was one; Experiments done by Francesco Redi . . . concerning that water which, it is said, stanches all spilling blood was another. 79 Giuseppe Del Papa, a professor at the University of Pisa, was among the first to turn the new interest in commonplace occurrences into an occasion for directly addressing a popular audience in The Nature of Humid and Dry . “[Our] natural desire for knowledge,” he began, “turns [our] attention only to those things that are very far from our nature and constitution or very rarely present themselves to our senses.” 80 Nevertheless, “many . . . things” that we know lit-

Printing Natural Knowledge 55 tle about “are close to our essence and very familiar, and . . . are always obvious and exposed to our senses.” Such phenomena were no less interesting for their ubiquitousness; indeed, the emptiness of the popular explanations showed that something much more complex must be going on than appeared at first sight. To remove the critics’ objections to overturning popular beliefs, he playfully banned readers who never asked themselves about their surroundings. “Vulgar and ignorant men [find] these things [to be] easily understandable, because according to them, feeling sensations repeatedly and understanding them are the same thing,” he observed, “but I do not intend to speak with such persons.” That gave him a good excuse to go into the Galilean and anti-Aristotelian explanation of hot and dry, to which he added a corpuscular view supported with long and amusing citations from his teacher Marchetti’s translation of Lucreti- us. Montanari went even further. In his Galilean dialogue on The Power of Aeo- lus , concerning a tornado that had “viciously struck many towns and villages in the territories of Mantua, Padua and Verona,” he tried to provide an easily accessible extended discussion that arrived, by cumulative conclusions, not at quantitative physics, but at the Cartesian theory of vortices. He even tried to surpass Galileo by using repeated references to the main topic to ensure that the reader would not get lost in his digressions on such other commonplace phenomena as the diffusion of water in waterfalls and the sound of a cracking whip—all of which could be explained by Cartesian corpuscularism. And to make sure the reader got his general point about the place of virtuosi in providing explanations for everyday phenomena, he included himself not as an un- named academic, which had been Galileo’s technique in the Dialogue Concern- ing the Two Great World Systems , but as one of the named interlocutors. 81 At first, journals contributed mainly by establishing the qualifications of the practitioners who took up their new roles as providers of explanations. Thus, when the Roman Giornale de’ letterati assured the reader that Ippolito Magnani was “a surgeon no less diligent in the cure of illnesses than sagacious and curious in the investigation of their causes,” 82 this was no mere concession to Ba- roque rhetoric practice. It was an acknowledgement that if science was to be dedicated to “public utility,” some knowledge about who provided it seemed important. 83 The same went for the journal’s reference to Salvatore Serra as “exceedingly expert in optics and other sciences.” 84 The independent journal article emerged in 1696 when Albrizzi began to include contributions whole and uncut. Practitioners could now publicize the main ideas of contemporary science and show themselves as the custodians of knowledge. Fardella took the cue to provide an exposé of one of the hottest top- ics of the day—Cartesian philosophy and its relation to Catholic orthodoxy. “The novelty of Descartes can be summed up,” he explained, “in a . . . new method of philosophizing . . . the mixing of physical and geometrical matters . . . that leads us spontaneously to the knowledge of many basic truths.” The worst danger was not in the philosophy’s opposition to Christianity but in not taking the philosophy seriously enough. “Many have said that it seems adapta- ble,” he complained, “to the weak and certain capacity of any uncultivated little girl.” 85 He then explained how science could be an essential aid to faith by lead-

56 Chapter 3 ing the mind where theology could not, and he ridiculed virtuosi who tried to mix the two. “What kind of philosophizing is this?” he said of one author. “First guided by Descartes he asserts that he understands with clarity and full evidence the existence of God and of his attributes. Then he abandons science and relies on faith alone by saying he firmly believes this.” 86 Finally, practitioners took up the journals in an appeal to the public for support in their scientific debates. Albrizzi’s open-door policy allowed them to use every tool available for convincing a popular audience about the validity of their conclusions—even if this meant neglecting legitimate scientific evidence in favor of rhetorical slight-of-hand. Vallisneri was exemplary. Sometimes he did not even bother to include the place of publication in reviews of works he opposed, since he had no interest in encouraging others to read them. Other times he reviewed works over a decade old just so he could bring up his favorite theses. “This book has traveled over from France,” he began one such review, “just to damage the good credit of medicine in Italy.” 87 In reviews of books he favored because they reflected the views of the moderns, he added to the impression of cultural depth and informativeness by squeezing as many names as he could into one sentence. “[The author] invites all physicians to defend their opinions,” he noted of one, “before Apollo himself, Bacon, and Boyle, elected as his assessors, and among his Councilors, Galileo, Redi and Gassendi. ”88 In reviews of his own books, he added rhetorical force to the original. In one, he replaced the documentary and empirical evidence of the original with assuranc- es that such-and-such “proves that” or “demonstrates” and conclusively “refutes Aristotle” on spontaneous generation, avoiding the reader’s personal evaluation of his evidence and so remaining at all times in full control of the significance of his presentation. Likewise, physician Lodovico Testi insisted in a review that his own book contained sufficient “physical reasons” to “prove that the air of Venice is entirely healthy,” and reserved his substantive exposé of the book’s arguments to a letter responding decisively to the objections of a critic. 89 Who could doubt his word? Finally, practitioners took over the task of writing textbooks, often experi- menting with new and more appealing modes of presentation. Alessandro Pas- coli, professor at the Sapienza in Rome, published a “new method” intended to introduce his readers to the latest acquisition of the search of the Italian practitioners for a philosophical basis for empirical research: introspection. In the first part, “an essay on metaphysics in the style of Descartes,” he showed that textbook writing could mean something more than just cribbing from the most authoritative or the most fashionable authors in the hands of someone who hap- pened to be a specialist in the field. And his approach was so promising that his printer saluted the “universal pleasure that the works of Signor Pascoli encounter” and dared to print them “at my own expense.” 90

The late seventeenth-century system of scientific communications permitted practitioners in the fields of natural knowledge to reconcile themselves to their new institutional situations. They could not expect instant recognition from their institutions now that science was divided between the universities, the Church, and the various governments, none of which was exclusively devoted to

Printing Natural Knowledge 57 science. But the emergence of a market for modern natural knowledge for the moment signified that no one was going to bother them any more about what they wrote—not, at least, for the reasons that had affected Galileo and his followers. They could ensure recognition among their fellows in very different institutional situations abroad by numerous outlets, from the epistolary networks to the journals to the innumerable independent forms, any of which could be combined with the others for innumerable repeat publications. They could depend on the journals to ensure that none of this activity would go unnoticed. They could procure social recognition among fellow-subjects of a state by the increasingly clear definition of themselves and their activities that they project- ed in their publications aimed at a popular audience. And with recognition at home and abroad, rewards from their institutions would surely follow. By the end of the century, the process was almost complete, and Bianchini’s assessment of the career of Montanari was emblematic of the changes that had taken place. “His profession . . . was not to sit in the shadow of a [university] chair practically at leisure, but to make the speculations of his mind useful for life and direct all of the theorems of science to this problem: to make science the minister of public felicity rather than a testimony of private effort.” None of the late seventeenth-century practitioners could have disagreed. 91 In spite of what modern scholarship might regard as journalism’s superiority as a communications tool, it never completely took over. Until well into the eighteenth century, natural science practitioners in Italy never sought forms of journalism more similar to the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society , which, by the admission of Sir Robert Moray, remained intentionally distinct from continental journalism by its inclusion of more reports on observations and experiments. 92 The peculiar exigencies of the Italian market demanded that accomplishments in the natural sciences should be set alongside accomplishments in every other field of learning. Journalism was assimilated into, instead of supplanting, an existing system, and within this system it added further moti- vations to those that were coming from educational institutions, as we shall see.

Notes

1. Correspondence of Marcello Malpighi , ed. Howard B. Adelmann, 5 vols. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), 1: 115, 19 January 1661. Concerning Malpighi, still fundamental is Howard B. Adelmann, Marcello Malpighi and the Evolution of Embryology, 5 vols. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1966). See also Domenico Bertoloni Meli, ed., Marcello Malpighi, Anatomist and Physician (Florence: Olschki, 1997). 2. Lettere inedite di huomini illustri, ed. Angelo Fabroni, 2 vols. (Florence: F. Moucke, 1773-5), 2: 161: “Impari a spese di Galileo, che patì tante contraddizioni, e molte per averla presa con questo e quello.” 3. Gregorio Leti, Italia Regnante , 4 vols. (“Valenza” [=Venice]: Vincenzo Guerini, 1675-6), 2: iiir. 4. Giornale de’ letterati [hereafter, GLR ] (Rome: 1674) , 97-98. Translation is from my Baroque Italy: Selected Readings (New York: Garland, 1995), 582. My view of the situation in France is in part based on A. Beaulieu, “Les réactions des savants français au début du dix-septième siècle devant l’heliocentrisme de Galilée,” in Paolo Galluzzi, ed.,

58 Chapter 3 Novità celesti e crisi del sapere. Atti del convegno internazionale di studi galileiani, 1982 (Florence: Giunti Barbera, 1984), 373-82. 5. Porzio’s Cartesianism is analyzed in Alessandro Dini, Filosofia della natura, medicina, religione: Lucantonio Porzio, 1639-1724 (Milan: Angeli, 1985), 14-24. The “atheist” trials are the subject of Luciano Osbat, L’Inquisizione a Napoli. Il processo agli ateisti, 1688-1697 (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1974). The Malpighi incident is report- ed in Correspondence of Marcello Malpighi, 1:400. 6. Lettere inedite, 1: 117, to Prince Leopoldo, 11 November 1658. 7. Correspondence of Marcello Malpighi, 1: 400, 14 February 1669. 8. A. Rupert Hall, Philosophers at war: the quarrel between Newton and Leibniz (Cambridge, 1980), chap. 3. Mail services are outlined in Bruno Caizzi, Dalla posta dei re alla posta di tutti. Territorio e comunicazioni in Italia dal XVI secolo all’Unità (Prato: Istituto di studi storici postali, 1993). 9. Research problems with the Magliabechi correspondence are outlined in Manuela Doni Garfagnini, Lettere e carte Magliabechi: Regesto , vol. 1 (Rome: Istituto storico italiano per l'eta moderna e contemporanea, 1981). The best mis à point of Maglia- bechi’s role is Françoise Waquet, “Antonio Magliabechi: nouvelles interpretations, nou- veaux problèmes,” Nouvelles de la république des lettres 1 (1982): 173-88. In addition, Correspondence of Marcello Malpighi , 4: 1664 (quote). In addition, here, Paul Dibon, “Les échanges épistolaires dans l’Europe savante du dix-septième siècle,” Revue de synthèse 97 (1976), 47. 10. Albert Van Helden, “The Accademia del Cimento and Saturn’s Ring,” Physis 15 (1973): 237-59. 11. Correspondence of Marcello Malpighi, 4: 1579, 25 February 1690. 12. Jean Huguetan, Voyage d’Italie curieux et nouveau (Lyons: T. Amaubry, 1681), 318, 283, 248. Galileo’s personal campaign in Rome is elucidated by Richard S. Westfall, “Science and Patronage: Galileo and the Telescope,” Isis 76 (1985): 11-30. 13. Correspondence of Marcello Malpighi, 1: 110, 29 December 1661. 14. Correspondence of Marcello Malpighi, 1: 115, 19 January 1661. 15. Stefano Degli Angeli, Considerazioni sopra la forza di alcune ragioni fisio- matematici addottate dal M.R.P. Giovanni Battista Riccioli della Compagnia di Gessù nel suo Almagest Nuova e Astronomiae Riformata contro il sistema copernicano (Venice: 1667). More details about Degli Angeli are in L. Tenca, “Stefano Degli Angeli,” Atti dell’Accademia delle Scienze dell’Istituto di Bologna, ser. 2, vol. 5 (1958): 194-207. 16. Letter of 11 October 1670, quoted in Mario Saccenti, Lucrezio in Toscana (Flor- ence: Olschki, 1966), 72. My analysis diverges from Paolo Galluzzi, “Libertà scientifica, educazione e ragion di stato in una polemica universitaria pisana del 1670,” in Atti del XXIV congresso nazionale di filosofia, L'Aquila, 28 aprile-2 maggio 1973 (Rome: Società filosofica italiana, 1973), vol. 2 pt. 2. 17. Saccenti, Lucrezio in Toscana , 103. 18. The best account of this, and the material in the next two paragraphs, is Jean Dietz Moss, Novelties in the Heavens. Rhetoric and science in the Copernican controversy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). Galileo’s comment is in Edizione nazionale delle opere di Galileo Galilei, 3rd edition, 20 vols. (Florence: Giunti Barbera, 1967), 9: 334; those of his opponents are in Ibid., 15: 56. 19. Contemporary rhetorical decorum in science was the object of Sforza Pallavicino, Trattato dello stile e del dialogo, ove nel cercarsi l’idea dello scrivere insegnativo, dis- corresi partitamente de’ veri pregi dello stile sì latino come Italiano (Rome: Mascardi, 1662 [1st impression: 1661]), chap. 30. 20. Saccenti, Lucrezio in Toscana , 89. 21. For reasons I explain in the next chapter. 22. Correspondence of Marcello Malpighi , 1: 38, 31 July 1660.

Printing Natural Knowledge 59 23. Correspondence of Marcello Malpighi, 4: 1553, 17 November 1689. Concerning Bellini, there is Giorgio Weber, L’anatomia patologica di Lorenzo Bellini anatomico (1843-1704) (Florence: Olschki, 1998). 24. I differ here from the conclusions of Maurizio Torrini, “Due galileiani a Roma: Raffaele Magiotti e Antonio Nardi,” in La scuola galileiana: prospettive di ricerca, atti del Convegno di S. M. Ligure, 1978, ed. Gino Arrighi (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1979), 53-63. 25. Correspondance de Marin Mersenne, ed. Paul Tannery and Cornelius De Waard, 17 vols. (Paris: Éditions du C.N.R.S., 1969), 6: 42, March 1636; 235, 20 June 1637; 258, 17 May 1637, and Descartes, Oeuvres , ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery, 2nd ed. (11 vols., Paris: Vrin, 1971-), 6: 515-18. 26. Francesco Eschinardi, Microcosmi physico-mathematici, seu compendii, in quo clare et breviter tractantur praecipuae Mundi partes, Coelum, Aer, Aqua, Terra: eorum praecipua accidentia, 1 (the only one published), (Perugia: 1658), quoted here at the un- paginated introduction. Biographical details are in William E. Knowles Middleton, “Sci- ence in Rome: 1675-1700, and the Accademia Fisico-Matematica of Giovanni Giusto Ciampini,” British Journal for the History of Science 8 (1975): 138-54; and in the entry by M. Mucillo in DBI 43 (1993): 273-4. 27. Claude Bérigard, Circulus pisanus. De veteri et peripatetici Philosophia, in Aristo- telis libros octo Physicorum, quattuor de coelo, Duos de Ortu et interritu, Quattuour de meteoris et Tres de anima . . . (Padua: Frambotti, 1661), 18. Bérigard is principally known for his opposition to Galileo’s cosmography, which is the basis for recent studies on him by Maria Laura Soppelsa, Genesi del metodo galileiano e tramonto dell’Aristotelismo nella Scuola di Padova (Padua: Antenore 1974), 92-112; M. Bellucci, “La filosofia naturale di Claudio Berigardo,” Rivista critica di storia della filosofia 26 (1971): 363-411; and Giorgio Stabile, “Il primo oppositore del Dialogo : Claude Bé- rigard,” Novità celesti , 277-82, and his Claudio Berigard, 1592-1663 . Contributo alla storia dell’atomismo seicentesco (Rome: Istituto di filosofia dell’Università, 1975). 28. Paolo Galluzzi, “Lettere di Giovanni Alfonso Borelli ad Antonio Magliabechi,” Physis 12 (1970): 277. 29. Giovanni Serpetro, Mercato delle meraviglie (Venice: per il Tomasini, 1653), un- paginated introduction. See Corrado Dollo, Modelli scientifici e filosofia nella Sicilia spagnola (Naples: Guida, 1984), 132-36. The earlier tradition of collections of secrets is the subject of William Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). 30. The work of the Jesuit investigators—not to be confused with the textbook compil- ers—is examined by Paolo Galluzzi, “Galileo contro Copernico: il dibattito sulla prova ‘galileiana’ di Giovanni Battista Riccioli contro il moto della Terra,” Annali del Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza, Firenze 2, no. 2 (1977): 87-97; Maurizio Torrini, “Giuseppe Ferroni Gesuita e galileiano,” Physis 15 (1973): 411-23. 31. Modern textbooks are analyzed by Roberto Maiocchi, “Il segreto di Pulcinella: la vittoria dell’atomismo attraverso la manualistica fisica,” Società e storia 10 (1987): 17- 52; 301-32. Earlier ones are analyzed by Patricia Reif, “The Textbook Tradition in Natu- ral Philosophy, 1600-1650,” Journal of the History of Ideas 30 (1969): 29. Jesuit teaching in Italy in this period is analyzed by Gabriele Baroncini, “L’insegnamento della filosofia naturale nei collegi italiani dei Gesuiti, 1610-1670: un esempio di nuovo aristotelismo,” in Gian Paolo Brizzi, ed., La “Ratio Studiorum”: modelli culturali e pratiche educative dei Gesuiti in Italia tra Cinque e Seicento (Rome: Bulzoni, 1981), 163-216; Romano Gatto, Tra scienza e immaginazione. Le matematiche presso il collegio gesuitico napoletano, 1552-1670 (Florence: Olschki, 1994); and Ugo Baldini, “ Legem impone subactis,” studi su filosofia e scienza dei Gesuiti in Italia, 1540-1632 (Rome: Bulzoni, 1992), 401-69, covering the period from 1600 to 1660.

60 Chapter 3 32. Giattini, Physica (Rome, 1653), 465. There is no study on Giattini. 33. Giattini, Physica , 621. 34. Giattini, Physica , 630-31. 35. Giattini, Physica , 615. 36. Lettere inedite, 2: 249, 5 September 1674, to Prince Leopold. 37. Correspondence of Marcello Malpighi, 4: 1478, 13 July 1689, to Scipione Borghe- se. 38. On Boccone’s laments, C. Dollo, Modelli scientifici e filosofia nella Sicilia spagnola , 69. Rossetti’s are in Lettere inedite , 2: 249, 5 September 1674, to Pietro Leo- poldo. 39. The seventeenth-century industry is still relatively unstudied, although there are some rudimentary indications in Alfonso Mirto, Stampatori, editori, librai nella seconda metà del Seicento (Florence: Centro editoriale toscano, 1984). 40. The incident is recorded in Correspondence of Marcello Malpighi , 3: 1276. 41. Jean-Michel Gardair, Le “Giornale de’ letterati”de Rome (1668-1681) (Florence: Olschki, 1984). Also helpful on this and the other Italian journals is Giuseppe Ricuperati, “Giornali e società nell’Italia dell’Ancien Régime,” La stampa italiana dal Cinquecento al Settecento , V. Castronovo and Nicola Tranfaglia, eds. (Bari: Laterza, 1976), 67-372; May Katzen, “The Changing Appearance of Research Journals in Science and Technolo- gy: an Analysis and a Case Study,” in A. J. Meadows, ed., The Development of Scientific Publishing in Europe (New York-Amsterdam: Elsevier Science Publishers, 1980), 177- 236. 42. GLR (1674): 151. 43. GLR (1669): 127. 44. GLR (1672): 9. 45. Correspondence of Marcello Malpighi , 4: 1600, 14 May 1690; 1434, 30 January 1688. 46. Correspondence of Marcello Malpighi , 3: 1088, 22 October 1685. 47. Baglivi himself sent his Medicina, pars altera (Avignon, 1687) for “onorata men- zione .” The Baglivi correspondence from the library of Sir William Osler, ed. Dorothy M. Schullian (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974), 102. 48. Montanari, La livella diottrica (Venice, 1680), dedication. 49. Montanari, Specolazioni fisiche sopra gli effetti di quei vetri temperati che rotti in una parte si risolvono tutti in polvere, esposti in due lettere (Bologna, 1671), preface by Agostino Fabri, a student of Montanari, “Al Discreto Lettore,” n.p. 50. Cassini’s broadsheets are Martis circa axem proprium revolubilis observationes Bononiae (Bologna, 1666); De periodo quotidianae revolutiones Martis (Bologna, 1666); De aliis Romanis observationibus macularum Martis (Bologna, 1666). Serra’s reply was in Martis Revolubilis observationes romanae ab affictis erroribus vindicatae (Rome, 1666). All are in Venice, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Misc. 871. A later example of the same genre was Giovanni Francesco Vanni’s Specimen liber de momentis gravium (Rome, 1684). 51. Paolo Boccone, Museo di fisica e di esperienze, variato e decorato di osservazioni naturali e note medicinali, e ragionamenti, secondo i principi de’ moderni (Venice, 1697), 39. The last quote is from p. 21. 52. Saggi di naturali esperienze (Florence: Cocchini, 1667). In this regard, Paolo Gal- luzzi, “L’Accademia del Cimento: ‘gusti’ del Principe, filosofia e ideologia dell’esperimento,” Quaderni storici 16 (1981): 788-844, although I disagree with the conclusion. 53. Geminiano Montanari, Pensieri fisico-matematici sopra alcune esperienze fatte in Bologna nell’Accademia Filosofica eretta dall’Illustrissimo e Reverendissimo Signor Ab. Carlo Antonio Sampieri intorno diversi effetti di liquidi in canuccie di vetro e altri vasi

Printing Natural Knowledge 61 (Bologna: Manolessi, 1667). Another similar work was Domenico Guglielmini, Ri- flessioni filosofiche dedotte dalla figura dei sali (Bologna: Pisarri, 1688). 54. A few biographical details on Albrizzi are from the entry by Giorgio E. Ferrari in Dizionario biografico degli italiani 2 (1960): 58-59; and from M. Lanaro, “Accademie ed editoria: l’attività degli Albrizzi a Venezia,” in Accademie e cultura: aspetti storici tra Sei e Settecento (Florence: Olschki, 1979), 227-72. 55. [Giovanni Domenico Cassini and Geminiano Montanari], Relazione dell’esperimenze fatte intorno alla trasfusione del sangue (Rome, 1668), reprinted in Bologna the same year. 56. On which, I refer to David A. Kronick, A History of Scientific and Technical Peri- odicals: The Origins and Development of the Scientific and Technical Press, 1665-1790 (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1976); and William D. Garvey, Communication: The Essence of Science (New York: Pergamon Press, 1979), 5. 57. See Susana Gómez López, Le passioni degli atomi. Montanari e Rossetti: una polemica tra galileiani (Florence: Olschki, 1996); Massimo Bucciantini and Maurizio Tor- rini, eds., Geometria e atomismo nella scuola galileiana (Florence: Olschki, 1992). 58. Correspondence of Marcello Malpighi , ii, 155, 30 March 1663. 59. Paracelsianism is analyzed in the articles by Marco Ferrari and Paolo Galluzzi in Scienze, credenze occulte, livelli di cultura, convegno internazionale di studi, Firenze, 26-30 June, 1980 (Florence: Olschki, 1982), 21-30, 31-62. 60. The quote from Malpighi is in Correspondence of Marcello Malpighi ,1: 70. In addition, Maurizio Torrini, “Uno scritto sconosciuto di Lionardo Di Capua in difesa dell’arte chimica,” Bollettino del Centro di Studi Vichiani 4 (1974): 126-39; Eugenio Garin, Dal Rinascimento all’Illuminismo (Pisa: Nistri-Lischi, 1970), 135-44; Walter Ber- nardi, Le metafisiche dell’embrione: scienze della vita e filosofia da Malpighi a Spallan- zani, 1672-1793 (Florence: Olschki, 1986), 68-70, 112-19. 61. The purely epistemological aspects of the shift are traced in Cesare Vasoli, L’enciclopedismo del Seicento (Naples: Bibliopolis, 1978). Bacchini’s Weltanschauung is the subject of Arnaldo Momigliano, “Mabillon’s Italian Disciples,” Essays in Ancient and Modern Historiography (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1977), 277-93. 62. Galleria di Minerva [hereafter, GM ], (1696): 368. A useful study is Donatella Lau- ria, Agostinismo e cartesianismo in Michelangelo Fardella (Catania: N. Giannotta, 1974). 63. Giornale de’ letterati (Parma/Modena: 1697): 31. 64. This is the main argument of Bernardi’s Le metafisiche dell’embrione . In addition, Lionardo Di Capua: Parere divisato in otto ragionamenti, ne’ quali particolarmente nar- randosi l’origine e il progresso della medicina, chiaramente l’incertezza della stessa si manifesta (Naples: Bulifon, 1681), 471. Vallisneri: “Dialogo sopra la curiosa origine di molti insetti,” 298. Capucci and Cestoni: Correspondence of Marcello Malpighi , 1: 411; 5: 1120. 65. Maurizio Torrini, Tommaso Cornelio e la ricostruzione della scienza (Naples: Guida, 1977). 66. On the role of this journal, see my Science, Politics and Society in Eighteenth- Century Italy (New York: Garland, 1991). 67. The exchange between Waller and Malpighi is in Correspondence of Marcello Malpighi , 5: 1916-18. Bellini’s difficulties in satisfying his correspondent are recorded in Ibid. , 3: 1276. 68. “Due osservazioni dell’eclisse lunare . . . la prima fu fatta in Bologna dal Sig. Conte Herede Zani e Pietro Mengoli e . . . l’altra . . . [in] Ginestreto, castello di Pesaro . . . dal Sig. Ab. Giovanni Francesco Laurenzi,” GLR (1674): 120, with a table comparing them. 69. Marie Boas Hall, “The Royal Society’s role in the diffusion of information in the seventeenth century,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 29 (1975): 188.

62 Chapter 3 70. GLR (1669): 104. 71. Genio dei letterati appagato (1706), n.p.; GM (1696), “Ai lettori,” n.p. 72. Some examples from ASV, Petizion: Inventari , filza 386.51.73 n.d., but 1680s; 385.51.82, 26 February 1685; 390.55.32, 1689; 386.51.39, 23 March 1684; 196.61.29, 5 April 1699. 73. ASV, Petizion: Inventari , filza 356.21.74, 5 August 1639. 74. ASV, Petizion: Inventari , filza 366.30.90, 31 November 1657. 75. ASV, Petizion: Inventari , filza 388.53.29bis, 17 January 1688. Chechel’s large collection of paintings is listed in Simona Savini Branca, Il collezionismo veneziano nel Sei- cento (Florence: Olschki, 1965), 141. 76. ASV, Petizion: Inventari , filza 339.64.5, 8 April 1702. 77. ASV, Petizion: Inventari , filza 364.28.81, 30 July 1653. 78. GM , (1697), 237 and 383. The quote is from Ibid ., 301: “Come se vorrai dimostrare che l’oro è nulla. Di zero fia zero fa nulla: la r è lettera canina, perchè la pronunziano i cani; quando per un osso fremono fra di loro. Or appunto per un nulla contrastano tutti gli uomini.” 79. Later collected in the Opuscoli vari di Francesco Redi (Florence: Piero Matini, n.d., but probably 1674). 80. Giuseppe Del Papa, Della natura del umido e del secco (Florence: Vincenzo Vangelisti, 1681), 7. 81. Geminiano Montanari, Le forze dell’Eolo: dialogo fisico-matematico sopra gli effetti del vortice, o sia turbine, detto negli stati Veneti la “bisciabuova” che il giorno 29 1686 ha scosso e flagellato molte ville e luoghi nei territori di Mantova, Padova, Verona, eccetera, opera postuma (Parma: A. Poletti, 1694). Other aspects of this work are noted in Salvatore Rotta, “Scienza e ‘pubblica felicità’ in Geminiano Montanari,” in Miscellanea Seicento (Florence: Le Monnier, 1971), 2: 64-204, on which I rely for other information regarding Montanari. 82. GLR (1668): 139. 83. For example, GLR (1674): 57: “Il buon genio del Sig. Cardinal de’ Medici [i.e., Prince Leopoldo] a favorire e promuovere gli studi e matematiche e filosofiche ed altri fa che tra le molte gravissime occupazioni sue trovi anche tempo di pensare a quel che può servire ai virtuosi per privata e pubblica utilità.” 84. GLR (1668): 79. 85. GM , (1697): 42. 86. GM , (1697): 203. 87. GM , (1696): 387, in reference to [Jean Devaux] Le médecin de soi-même (Leyden: 1682). In addition, GM , (1700): 98. 88. GM , (1706): 322. 89. GM , (1697): 282, 290. 90. Alessandro Pascoli, Nuovo metodo per introdursi ad imitazione dei geometri con ordine, chiarezza e brevità nelle più sottili questioni di filosofie, metafisiche, logiche, morali, e fisiche (Venice: Andrea Poletti, 1702), printer’s preface. 91. Francesco Bianchini, Introduction to Montanari, Le forze dell’Eolo , n.p. 92. Christiaan Huygens, Oeuvres Complètes , 22 vols. (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1888- 1950), 5: 234. On this, Wolfgang Van den Daele, “The Social Construction of Science. Institutionalization and Definition of Positive Science in the Latter Half of the Seven- teenth Century,” in Everett Mendelsohn, Peter Weingart, and Richard Whitley, eds., The Social Production of Scientific Knowledge, Sociology of the Sciences: a Yearbook 1 (Dordrecht-Boston: D. Reidel, 1977), 31.

Printing Natural Knowledge 63